Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

Hi, I am interested in the device, have been skimming over this thread and also read the (already great) wiki page about the device.

I have one question. Should be an easy one, but I could not picture it from what I read: Take it some of you have installed Arch as a dual boot. I understand you have to press " CTRL-L" to get to the seabios, ok. Is that still in developer mode or can you turn developer mode _off_ again, after having installed the dual-boot Arch?

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

Strike0 wrote:

Hi, I am interested in the device, have been skimming over this thread and also read the (already great) wiki page about the device.

I have one question. Should be an easy one, but I could not picture it from what I read: Take it some of you have installed Arch as a dual boot. I understand you have to press " CTRL-L" to get to the seabios, ok. Is that still in developer mode or can you turn developer mode _off_ again, after having installed the dual-boot Arch?

You just need to press enter or space or whatever instead of Ctrl+L and it'll take you through some simple prompts to easily go back to Chrome OS if you so choose.

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

Well u guys are obviously talking past each other Yes you need to have developer mode enabled in order to press the ctrl + l combination. Anyway if you choose to disable developer mode the chromebook would reset itself. So there is no point in doing this.

By the way: Did anyone notice any difference since the last past updates of the system? I did an update yesterday and all the special keys seems to be sort of "newly detected".

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

@madx: Did you get a chance to test out the internal microphone? I've found that it only records if I set the "Internal Mic Boost" to 0 in alsamixer. I suspect this is releated to the issue mentioned here about the sound card doing things in a funny way. They seem to have resolved it, but I'm not sure how to translate that back into Arch. Only being able to record at very low volume (with substantial background noise) is somewhat limiting.

Has anyone else run into this, and did you have any workarounds? I'm toying with installing pulseaudio as I saw that seemed to work for a similar issue with Chrubuntu on the C720, but I haven't gotten that working. So I'm open to ideas or confirmation.

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

I think the sound card and alsa/pulse have some issues because with either one I seem to have problems. I've tried just using alsa with no configuration other than what is in the wiki:

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.confoptions snd_hda_intel index=1

I get sound and everything but I can't help but notice an occasional pop or skip in the audio. It's hard to know for sure because of the bad speakers but I don't notice it that often.

Another thing is that I've been getting these errors in the console when using mame and dosbox:lib pcm.c:7843:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred

I still haven't found out how to fix that or if it's some issue with sdl. It seems like a similar problem found here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2033089 so I tried messing with dsnoop and dmix values but couldn't get the error to go away. I did notice that using aoss with mame seemed to prevent any errors.

I tried installing pulseaudio but again, I couldn't help but notice the occasional hiccup in audio so I'm not sure if it's actually helping anything.

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

You can make the Seabios by default and don't need to use Ctrl L at boot and this is supposed to work in other chromebooks as well

Divulged this evening by Duncan Laurie on the coreboot mailing list:

If you want to boot SeaBIOS by default and you have unlocked the SPI flash write protection you can set flags in the (write protected) “GBB” flash region that will make it boot legacy mode by default.

In Chrome OS there is a script called set_gbb_flags.sh that will do this for you. Run the script with no arguments to get a list of possible flags and then to enable short dev mode screen (1 second timeout) followed by default legacy mode boot you could use these flags:

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

You can make the Seabios by default and don't need to use Ctrl L at boot and this is supposed to work in other chromebooks as well

Divulged this evening by Duncan Laurie on the coreboot mailing list:

If you want to boot SeaBIOS by default and you have unlocked the SPI flash write protection you can set flags in the (write protected) “GBB” flash region that will make it boot legacy mode by default.

In Chrome OS there is a script called set_gbb_flags.sh that will do this for you. Run the script with no arguments to get a list of possible flags and then to enable short dev mode screen (1 second timeout) followed by default legacy mode boot you could use these flags:

I would really love to try this out, but i have one question left: If i have chrome os and archlinux as dualboot, will i be still able to use chrome os?

EDIT: I just set the flags on my hp chromebook 14 and this is working great! Thanks a lot. For those who are also curious: After this step you can still boot chrome os by hitting the ctrl + d combination.

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

You can make the Seabios by default and don't need to use Ctrl L at boot and this is supposed to work in other chromebooks as well

Divulged this evening by Duncan Laurie on the coreboot mailing list:

If you want to boot SeaBIOS by default and you have unlocked the SPI flash write protection you can set flags in the (write protected) “GBB” flash region that will make it boot legacy mode by default.

In Chrome OS there is a script called set_gbb_flags.sh that will do this for you. Run the script with no arguments to get a list of possible flags and then to enable short dev mode screen (1 second timeout) followed by default legacy mode boot you could use these flags:

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

Silly me, I forgot that I had the write-protect screw on. Instead of writing the flags, it was corrupting it. Removing the screw solved it for me.

Since I corrupted it, I had to recover my system and reinstall it. I've ran the script and my system now boots after 1 second directly into Arch! My guess then is that you could run the command from a chroot (as long as you bind proc, sys etc), but I can't guarantee.

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

Is anyone else still having issues with the sound card coming back from suspend? I have setup the cros-acpi-wakeup.conf tmpfile and and the cros-sound-suspsend system-sleep script as suggested on the wiki. Also have tpm_tis.force=1 in my boot parameters.

Still maybe 80% of the time the machine comes back from suspend the card is not active.

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

ciarlill wrote:

Is anyone else still having issues with the sound card coming back from suspend? I have setup the cros-acpi-wakeup.conf tmpfile and and the cros-sound-suspsend system-sleep script as suggested on the wiki. Also have tpm_tis.force=1 in my boot parameters.

Still maybe 80% of the time the machine comes back from suspend the card is not active.

Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing this.

Have you tried the solution from the wiki? Create "/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf" with

output=options snd_hda_intel index=1

I haven't noticed any issues with sound playback, but I can't increase the Microphone Boost. There seems to be a DC Bias that prevents the microphone from being boosted beyond a certain point.

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

Have you tried the solution from the wiki? Create "/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf" with

output=options snd_hda_intel index=1

I haven't noticed any issues with sound playback, but I can't increase the Microphone Boost. There seems to be a DC Bias that prevents the microphone from being boosted beyond a certain point.

Yes but mine reads exactly like the one in the wiki:

options snd_hda_intel index=1

Again the only time there is a problem is coming back from suspend. When I open the laptop I cannot even launch alsamixer. I also tried manually echoing the codes from cros-sound-suspend.sh and get "device not found".

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

Have you tried the solution from the wiki? Create "/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf" with

output=options snd_hda_intel index=1

I haven't noticed any issues with sound playback, but I can't increase the Microphone Boost. There seems to be a DC Bias that prevents the microphone from being boosted beyond a certain point.

Yes but mine reads exactly like the one in the wiki:

options snd_hda_intel index=1

Again the only time there is a problem is coming back from suspend. When I open the laptop I cannot even launch alsamixer. I also tried manually echoing the codes from cros-sound-suspend.sh and get "device not found".

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

I am using BSPWM as Window Manager and SDDM as the Display Manager. Oddly enough I have not been able to reproduce this in the past day even though it has been plaguing me at random times before that. I am wondering if it might not be related to leaving a browser active during suspend, which might have control of the card. Just a shot in the dark though and not a real issue until I can more reliably reproduce it.

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

ciarlill wrote:

I am using BSPWM as Window Manager and SDDM as the Display Manager. Oddly enough I have not been able to reproduce this in the past day even though it has been plaguing me at random times before that. I am wondering if it might not be related to leaving a browser active during suspend, which might have control of the card. Just a shot in the dark though and not a real issue until I can more reliably reproduce it.

thanks

Hmm, that seems possible. I'm guessing you are not using pulseaudio. Have you tried reloading the alsa modules?

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

Hi,

I have trouble getting the wifi to run.Do I have to install a driver or firmware to get it running?I think this would be mentioned in the great wiki page, but it isn't so I'm not sure, if this is the correct way.